Grants and goals

We are delighted that the AMBIT project (which heavily overlaps with the TiddlyManuals project described here) based at the Anna Freud Centre have just been awarded a generous grant from Comic Relief and from another private donor, which will allow us to place a considerable focus on development of the current AMBIT Manual so as to improve it - we hope very substantially.

The focus of the project for Comic Relief is to improve the access and reduce costs of quality training for workers on the front-line with "hard-to-reach" and complex youth (that's young people who have combinations of mental health problems, offending, substance use, and major vulnerabilities like family breakdown, abuse, etc - the most vulnerable youth one can imagine, really). One of the key vehicles for delivering this training and then supporting these workers to stay on track, is the online TiddlyManual. Increasingly we will be adding streaming video inserts - to model best practice - alongside the text entries that explain the theoretical underpinnings ("why we suggest doing it like that"), as well as didactic material, that might suit those who learn better by watching and listening rather than reading.

There will also be a big push to improve the user interface, which is still ropey, reflecting my beginner status as a web designer. Any practitioners using existing local versions of the manual (see TiddlyManuals) are reminded that it is their feedback that helps me see it afresh; only beginners retain that ability to see the "Emperor's new clothes" - when you spend too much time writing a wiki you start to rely on your memory rather than the signposting that most users rely upon.

Alongside this we will be working towards establishing a collaborative forum at the Anna Freud Centre, with some of the many non-statutory agencies working in this field. The purpose of this is really twofold: to share experiences and pool thoughts about the basic "skill set" that these workers need, and to share our experience of developing and delivering AMBIT in the field and our enthusiasm for the tiddlywiki approach to the manualization of treatment. At its core, what we like about the Tiddlymanual approach to treatment manualization it is the capacity to balance:
(a) the 'centralisation' and 'top-down' nature of sharing the most evidence-based aspects of practice with
(b) the radical devolution of manualizing to the level of the local team, so that a local version of the manual shares "our specific implementation of this way of working" alongside well-conducted measures of the outcomes for young people through working in this way, with these kids, and in this setting.